Chronicles of a Stay-at-Home-Mother

Sophie the Giraffe
Photo Credit: Amazon.com

Chronicles of a Stay-at-Home-Mother
Subtitle: Things Fall Apart & Things Come Together

Somedays, I sit back and listen to my inner voice about the things that I celebrate and the things that I loathe and can only make fun of myself.  So sad about losing Sophie the Giraffe teething toy to someone else at Target?  Thrilled that my daughter is potty-trained, and so excited when we hear her tinkle?  Excited about the many opportunities surfacing to now make healthy freezer cooking meals?
Seriously, who am I?  A SAHM (stay-at-home-mom), that's who I am.

Lest I start to get cynical and think these things aren't valuable or worthwhile, I remind myself, they are:

Sophie was an investment I made in faith. Firstly, that buying a famous rubber teething toy that hails from France wouldn't result in my flying around the story like a willy-nilly trying to find her in every crook and cranny and calling guest services more than once to inquire about her, but alas, when she was no longer seen in Gabe's carseat cozily tucked in next to him, that's exactly what I did.  Also, she was great for Gabe to chew on.  Good investment, that unfortunately someone else is now banking on...

That's not Mia.Photo credit: life123.com

Now, as you (should) know, potty-training is a life skill.  Think about how many times a day you use the bathroom (or...don't), and thank your parents or some other kind individual that they taught you how to control this bodily function.

Freezer Meals
Photo Credit: apartmenttherapy.com

And freezer meals*....huzzah! To not have to worry about how I'm going to make dinner every night  -  I mean, the proverbial "what's for dinner?" question would never again send me into hysterics.


Now, to get back to Downton Abbey before the kids wake up (yeah right).



*Other healthy real food options for freezer cooking that I've recently found:
Health Home & Happiness Grain-free Freezer Cooking
Once a Month Mom - Whole Foods menu (they also have gluten-free & dairy-free menus too!)

Who's in charge around here?

After months of having fun with Mia, just doing our daily "day-to-day" with little to no consequence, life throws a curveball at us.  Or maybe we've been well overdue.  I mean, after a string of a few solid months when people ask you, "How are you? How's life?" and you genuinely can say, "Great!" without adding qualifiers in your head ("Well, it'd be MORE wonderful if ____..."), maybe our time for real nonsense had arrived.

Maybe it is time for the terrible twos.

Mia is less than a month away from entering the age of two, technically, but behaviorally she's been there for the past month or so.  Greg and I are starting to feel like everybody's out of sync, out of control and we need some firm footing again.

So, back to the drawing board where decisions will be made, a few choices eliminated, and this chiquita bambina is going to relearn who's the boss.  Not her...ME.  Not her...Daddy.
I'm all about "empowering" kids to know what they're capable of doing, but I'm not all about entitling kids to feel like anything's free game.  So, while my actions may not have been clear to Mia in the past about communicating this ideal, it's about to change.

Wish us luck and send up a prayer or share a word of encouragement with us.  We're total n00bs and humbly admit we need the most guidance here.

And to total newbies: Don't worry...it's not always like this, and every kid is different, and you can learn from our mistakes!  That's part of the point of this blog...to share ideas!

food. Food. FOOD!

Spend any amount of time with a person and you'll eventually talk about food, will you not?  It's a basic, daily, pedestrian task.  And it should be enjoyed.

But what do you do if eating suddenly becomes something you no longer enjoy?  You worry about the physical reactions you'll have later or you wonder if the food that is going into your body is really fueling you how it should?  Trust me, I've been there.

Food has been such an exploratory and sometimes controversial topic for me over the last year.  You could say at some points I've been obsessed about it.  Really, you could, because it's true.  First I was a bit cautious about what Mia ate when she starting experimenting with more solids.  She was a perfect little being and I really didn't want to "mess her up," until I realized you just got to do what you can do and "let it be."  The cards will fall where they may. Then I turned the spotlight on myself and decided, it's time to figure out what really makes this system work or fail, especially because I felt I was having a LOT of failures.

I've been on such a crazy learning curve of late, that while I feel voraciously HUNGRY for more information, sometimes I just need to turn off the news flow of information and just calm.down.  For real.  It can get a bit much.

Which is why my motto for this year is "everything in moderation."

Greg & I have been discussing what foods were truly intended for our bodies and we've struggled to figure out if certain foods were mentioned in the Bible why would they not be okay now?  (Like wheat and bread, for example.  The New Testament even calls Jesus the "bread of life.")  To not do a research paper on it all right now, all I will say is some things have changed in the processing and growing of wheat in the last 100 years that can sometimes make it much harder for a person's digestive system to handle.  Don't get me wrong though: I love bread, I love toast, and I don't hate grains.  I just have to quote 1 Cor. 10:23 (NIV, 1984 version):
"Everything is permissible"--but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible"--but not everything is constructive."


We may be allowed to eat all things but not everything necessarily works for us.  Right now I'm in the midst of another cleanse.  I know it makes me sound like a yo-yo, I really do.  But I'm just trying to work one more thing out for my little gut, and then hopefully I'll be able to reintroduce grains bit by bit at some point.  Because right now, not all things are beneficial for me.  I really wish it was, because man, those fritos in our pantry are CALLING MY NAME.  "EAT ME!!!"


But instead, I'm gonna hard-boil some eggs for some protein snacks down the road and try to make myself a new recipe of gluten-free pizza crust.  I'm trying to slay the sugar & grain monster right now so shoot up some prayers for my patience.  You don't know how good ice cream, cupcakes, french bread, and a Jimmy John's sandwich sound right now.  In due time, in due time.  

Where everyday feels like a sitcom

While I hardly watch sitcoms anymore (don't they seem like a dying breed?), somedays it feels my life parodies them all too much!

Enter this morning, a slow, not-much-planned sort of morning, where Mia & I journeyed around the block as we are wont to do, said hi to a few animals, trash trucks, and neighbors, and then high-tailed it back home. I saw a tub of new pills for me sitting on the counter and thought, "Oh yeah, I should take one of those today (because I haven't yet)".  Mind you, I'm not the greatest pill taker, but I judged the size of these bad-boy capsules yesterday and considered them doable, and while they went down a bit hard yesterday, I figured I'd be big-girl enough for them today. 

Err not.  I instantly started feeling that tightness in my throat, that foreboding feeling that this isn't going to go so well.  Usually the trick when a pill or some kind of food gets stuck in my throat is to "drink it down," most often with some kind of fizzy, carbonated drink.  We just so happen to not have any of that stuff in the house (wonder why??) and so as I'm realizing this, and Mia's looking at me strangely wondering why mommy is regurgitating and gagging in the sink, and I come to terms with the fact that we're going to have to get out of the house and do one thing: drive-thru McDonald's for a Sprite.

I load us up in the car...as much as we're trying not to look like trailer trash, on this particular morning, it just cannot be avoided.  Mia's wearing her PJ shirt & jean shorts & Robeez, and I'm trying to hide my hair & face with a hat, probably not very successfully. I grab a bowl from the kitchen and we're off to the nearest McD's, which is probably about .7 miles from our house.

I start to hear sympathy coughs from the backseat as Mia is such the mimic these days.  "I guess we're supposed to be coughing right now?" I'm thinking she's thinking.  I can barely order the Sprite at the drive-thru, but I muster up the voice to do it and find the correct change and pull on through. $1.07.  4 quarters, 1 nickel and 2 pennies, thank you!

After my initial sip of the Sprite, my fears are not allayed and the pill still feels all too stuck in my esophageal canal.  What to do, what to do??  I'm again, still using my bowl, hearing the sympathy coughs from Mia, and wondering why my carbonated fizzy drink is not pulling its gurgly weight.

Next step, call Greg.  Of course, he'll know what to do, 16 miles away at his desk.  Right??  Right.  Well, we talk for a bit, in between my gagging, and he convinces me to drive over to my dr's office.  After all, Mia's already loaded up in the car, I have my belongings, and a nonproductive Sprite, what's the worst that could happen?

Our family care doctor's office is pretty much "just down the road," and I'm probably there in less than ten minutes. I take a careful cursory glance of the parking lot just to get a measure on how busy the place is, and after walking in, see a wholly empty waiting room.  Sweet.  The familiar looking receptionist sees me and I blurt out, "Hi, I didn't have an appointment, but I have a pill stuck in my throat, and I can't get it down," all the while trying to contain another gagging & regurgitation episode.  She tells me that there's only one practitioner in today and he's seeing a patient, but can I wait?  I nod and then bolt for the nearest trash can, but I just couldn't make it.  (See, when you get something stuck in your throat, it's really hard for anything to pass around it, even from simple swallows.  I'm trying to be as LEAST graphic as possible.)

A nurse opens up the door and nods that I can come back.  I kind of gesture to the powder-room-like trash can and she says, "You can bring it."  Uh, okay, but what about the mess I made on the side of it?  I'm feeling truly sorry and disgusting at this moment.  Mia follows me into the hall and then starts crying, probably thinking, "I know this place, and what are they going to do to me? Or my mommy???"  I pick her up and the nurse beckons me into the lab room.  I try to tell her what has happened and then I see the ARNP walk by and she gestures him in. 

He finishes up some paperwork with a patient, turns around, sort of recognizes me (he's around my age, has seen both me & Greg before, and was the NP who diagnosed my blood clot last year), and asks me what's going on.  I give the same explanation as I did at the front desk, "Well, I swallowed a pill, it got stuck in my throat, and usually a carbonated drink will push it down, but this time it didn't."  He asks if I've gurgled at all (um, no, but does gagging count?) and then asks to feel my throat (and as I'm typing this I'm just shaking my head because it's just really embarrassing) and says he's basically trying to "tick off [my] esophagus so that it'll move down or come back up."  Those are really only the two options that I have here: the pill can dissolve and move down, or it can come back and I've never had the latter option happen.  Within another minute or two of talking with him, I feel a quick downward motion in my GI tract and feel pretty confident the pill passed.  I test my theory by sipping a bit of the Sprite and am instantly enthused; it worked!  Do I still feel totally ridiculous for making a mess of their trash can and busting up into their office without an appointment because of a stuck pill?  Absolutely.  But did it finally go down and was I within range of immediate medical help just in case?  Yes. 

I clean up the trash can, dispose of our junk, wash my hands, and Mia & I are on our merry way home.

Just another morning in the life of a Chiquita Bambina and her Mamacita!

And don't worry, I'll be breaking up those huge monster pills from now on!